"You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process." Well, er..., Chinese classic poetry is the quite subtle and expressive, I have heard. And

"You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process." Well, er..., Chinese classic poetry is the quite subtle and expressive, I have heard. And, not sure for your native language but for mine, if I read or hear a word that I do not know, I also have to take the dictionnary. Moreover, in many cases, I will not know how to pronounce a name I never heard before. And, well, building a search engine is much simpler in Chinese, because characters do not change. So yes, there is (almost) no stemming, because you do not need to stem the words before indexing or searching. Another point you did not mention: printing Chinese characters on a paper or a screen is much simpler: all of them have the same width and height. No kerning. No need for text justification (almost). Do you know that when preparing for a book in French the typographs have to make sure there is no "rivers" in the page and adjust word spaces accordingly?